A Peripatetic List of Words I've Looked Up, Political Edition

palingenesis — rebirth or recreation; used in philosophy, science, political theory, and theology

    biology — another word for “recapitulation”, the phase in an organism’s development during which it experiences evolutionary change

    theology — reincarnation / baptismal rebirth

    palingenetic ultranationalism— “national rebirth”; one of the core promises of fascism.             Palingenesis in this context is often achieved through violence.

    I saw a video today of a widely-known and -respected photographer named Christopher Morris getting choke-slammed to the ground by a man in a gray suit, as a crowd of white people screamed in orgasmic ecstasy. It’s hard to tell, in the video (or the various others of the moments preceding and following it), if the crowd is cheering for the assault on Morris, the ejection of some black American activists that happened moments earlier, or something else entirely — something said by the man who was the reason for the occasion, Donald Trump. Morris, who works for Time magazine, is a willowy man in his mid-50s who is well-known on the campaign trail, and spent years photographing President George W Bush. In the video, he’s obviously carrying a camera. In a subsequent video, shortly after being allowed to stand, he attempts to demonstrate what was done to him by placing a hand on his assailant’s neck, at which point he is arrested. The Trump campaign says his assailant was a member of the US Secret Service.

    I’m not an historian of anything other than my own life, and I’m certainly not an expert on any political system. I try as hard as I can to be a person who can step back from naked partisanship and see the bigger picture; this is made easier by the fact that I hold heterodox liberal views, meaning there’s basically no group for me to get my identity conflated with in order to obviate choice or annihilate the need for critical thought. I also try, as much as I can, to be cautious about change — the people who promise it, the scope of its possibility, the labels it receives. Unlike a lot of my friends, I was never disillusioned by Barack Obama’s inability to remake the federal government in his own liberal, technocratic image — because I never believed he would. I’m not stating this litany in order to make myself look better or smarter than other people, though I will admit that in my smuggest moments sometimes I do feel that way. It’s mostly about trying to avow my neutrality, to get you to see that I am not, as a rule, one of those lefties who believes that conservatives drink the blood of liberal babies. Because what I’m about to say is going to feel a little bit like that, I suspect.

    In the course of the last few months I have run across the word palingenesis a couple of times, and eventually jotted the above notes on it into a big file I have on my computer called WORDS I’VE LOOKED UP. Most of these words come from the lapidary phrases penned by literary docents, and I keep them so that sometimes I can page through them and feel a certain weltschmerz about my waning on-command vocabulary and how it doesn’t measure up to Zadie Smith’s or David Foster Wallace’s. But palengenesis kept coming up when I was reading about Fascism — real, big-F Fascism, of the sort practiced by Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Adolph Hitler. I was reading about Fascism for the same reason that a lot of people have been reading about Fascism lately: Donald J Trump seems like a bit of a fascist.

    Despite its dire connotations, palingenesis actually helped me maintain a grip on that cautious, skeptical-of-change nature I was talking about before. Make no mistake, Trump’s “politics” (if that’s what you call his unerring instinct for saying what some people want to hear and convincing them that this is somehow an act of bravery) are ugly and dangerous, and there’s a convincing argument to be made that he’s the inevitable result of the white identity politics that the Republican Party has been playing footsie with at least since the days when Nixon was developing the Southern Strategy.* But one of the tenets of Fascism, as practiced both by Mussolini and Hitler, was that they and their parties would bring about a sort of national rebirth — and not just a national rebirth, but a rebirth occasioned by political violence, often in the form of ethnic cleansing. Hitler, popularizing the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth, asserted that the First World War had been lost, not through the German Command’s various tactical and strategic blunders, not because the Central Powers were vastly out-numbered and out-resourced, not because they awoke the sleeping giant that was the USA, but because lily-livered pantywaists back home chickened out — and these lily-livered pantywaists were, largely, Jewish bureaucrats who didn’t really feel any loyalty to Germany. Germany would be reborn through the violent expulsion or incarceration of such subversives. Eventually expulsion and incarceration devolved into outright murder. And, whatever else you could say about Donald Trump’s various ugly lies and panderings, he was not calling for violence. Palingenetic ultranationalism, one of the core tenets of Fascism, was not a part of his deal.

*Note: links to a Washington Post op-ed written by Robert Kagan, a prominent Neocon who has been slipping left ever since John McCain decided that Sarah Palin was a plausible candidate for national office.

    But the more I watch things like the orgiastic reaction that Trump’s crowds have had to violence — Morris is just the most recent in a long line of people to have come a-cropper of Trump partisans or paid thugs — the more I worry about it. Trump appears to have no fixed ideology other than Trumpism. Though he appears to me to be a fatuous gasbag, he’s managed to build a sort of cult of personality around himself as a compulsive truth-teller and caller-out of bullshit (irrespective of the fact that his “truths” are, in fact, meaningless pablum usually shot through with lies, and there is no bigger bullshitter than himself). He clearly lives for those cheers and screams; without them, he would have no concept of himself. I’ve come to believe that, if he saw the opportunity to accrue more adulation by proposing a program of ethnic and/or political violence, he would do it. He has no shame, or limits, or sense of responsibility to his nation or the world. His desperation for adulation would be sad if it hadn’t become so dangerous. He’s already promising the rebirth — “make America great again”, he says, as though America’s greatness were not, in fact, still completely self-evident in most respects. The US is a nation troubled by economic divides, bad crime policy, and a dipshit system of government, but it is still unequivocally the largest economic, military, and cultural power on the planet. The things Trump claims to want to do — like push people around in trade negotiations — are things we’re already doing. He lives in a dreamy paper world, constructed by the heirs of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, in which increasing diversity and the empowerment of the disenfranchised somehow equates to decline rather than massive progress. When the rebirth one promises largely involves the re-subjugation of troublesome minorities, the call to violence against those minorities is just on the other side of a door. All he needs do is open it.

    I know some people on the left who say that Marco Rubio is “just as dangerous” as Donald Trump; some who fear Ted Cruz because he seems competent where Trump is, as mentioned above, a fatuous gasbag. I don’t have much interest in living in a world constructed by either of those men and the parties they would lead, either, but I think the equation isn’t balanced. Trump’s lack of experience with the traditional levers of power could thwart him; perhaps the Republican Party could co-opt him, as some reports have suggested. My instincts run that way myself; I suspect he would be an embarrassing, ineffectual President, possibly even one who got impeached within a few years of taking office. But there are far more dangerous possibilities in there, too. A man who wishes only to build a cult of personality around himself will have no compunction about simply obliterating the traditional levers of power. Mussolini and Hitler both came to power toting with them paramilitary groups that allowed them to enforce policies that were not, in fact, hugely popular, through brute force. Military leaders could, as one article I saw suggested, refuse to follow his orders — but the white identity politics he plays with appeals to a group of people htat is heavily armed, and ready for a guerrilla action against the federal government already. And even if Trump does not use the militia movement as an impromptu Schutzstaffel, do we really want to live in a country where the military no longer responds to civilian control? I don’t. An America decapitated in a coup is only marginally better than one dominated by a minority of Trumpists and their arsenals.

    Robert McNamara, who had a lot of opportunity to contemplate both nuclear war and human fallibility, once told the documentarian Errol Morris, “the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.” A modified version of this is why I think Trump is a far more dangerous phenomenon than any more traditional conservative candidate, little though I agree with those people’s political views. It’s possible that we could just let Trump keep going, assuming that eventually he’ll implode, or run up against the limits of his own self-regard, or get lucky and not fuck it up too badly. But that strikes me as an incredibly irresponsible way of looking at things. The indefinite combination of Donald Trump and political power will eventually destroy this nation. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and he’ll lose in the general election. Or he’ll come to heel once he realizes what’s involved in the Presidency. Or he’ll bow to Congress. Or he’ll listen to his military advisors. Or he’ll have a heart attack from the stress. Or any of a number of other things. But do we really want to gamble on that?